Six unique ingredients to lower piglet feed cost: Create balanced, high-quality piglet diets with lesser-known ingredients

摘要

Piglet feed is undoubtedly the most expensive diet in a pig's life, and although its contribution to final cost per pig remains less than 2 percent, there are incentives to lower the cost per pound of feed, both for the piglet feed producer and the pig producer. When it comes to the "sensitive" initial couple diets post-weaning (depending on weaning age, these could be for piglets weighing from 10-20 pounds), the term "fixed" is frequently used in nutrition discussions regarding formulation. This refers to the fixed inclusion rate for certain key ingredients such as whey, soybean products, cooked cereals and fish meal. This comes into contrast with the least-cost formulations used in the case of growing-finishing piqs, where' ingredient prices determine actual inclusion' rate and the chance appearance of alternative ingredients, such as in the recent case of DDGS or soy hulls in the past.